James Enge - Blood of Ambrose

"A little bird told you?" remarked Genjandro's mouth. "You can't even trust birds these days, I guess. No, I found it possible to eat Genjandro in the end, just as I shall eat each one of you. Isn't that an amusing thought?"

Lathmar could see from Ambrosia's face that she didn't find it amusing-but that she feared it might be true.

Morlock clambered as rapidly as possible over the railing onto the balcony of the adept's tower chamber. If he had been the adept, he would have been waiting there with a blunt object to solve his Morlock problem once and for all. But there was no one present that he could see.

Near the window entrance was a sorcerer's worktable, and standing upright atop it was a strip of some translucent, irregularly glowing substance. As Morlock glanced at it he saw faces rising from the base of the strip, twisting and changing color as they passed up its length, then contracting and darkening at the top and sinking to the bottom again. Perhaps it was meant to be a lamp-there was no other light source than the window in the dim room-but it was very dim and irregular. On the other hand, it radiated power; most likely it was some sort of experiment or spell left here by the adept to run its course.

His fear that the adept was not present at all recurred to him. But, Morlock reminded himself, the adept didn't have to be here for Morlock to kill him. He saw the stairway leading to the lower chamber and leapt down it.

The lower chamber was darker; there was no window to light it. The air was thick down there, too; the whole place was redolent of rotting flesh. But the vats the King had described were there, glowing faintly by their own light.

Morlock heard a snuffling sound in the far end of the chamber. He drew Tyrfing and stepped toward it. He had not gone far when he saw its source. It was like an unfinished sketch for a body-no head, no hands or feet. From the way it flopped when it moved it seemed to have no bones. It snuffled and crept in a mindless circle around a vat containing human innards that breathed and pulsed and twitched with life.

Staring at it (the striations on its dark red surface were oddly like muscle tissue), Morlock thought suddenly of Urdhven. Was this formless form some fraction of his body, not superficial enough to be included in his walking self, not vital enough to be placed in the vat? And here it was, whuffling about in the hopeless hunger of being restored to its organs?

Morlock summoned the rapture of vision. It partly confirmed his guess: there were dim tal-lines connecting the misshapen shape with the organs within the vat. Other tal-lines stretched across the floor and up the stairs, out of sight. Going to carry life and sustenance from the vitals to Urdhven's walking shell?

He turned away. There were only two vats with organs in them; he guessed the other contained the organs of the adept's central body nexus.

These, too, were rippling with life. But no tal-lines extended from them that Morlock could see. Were they mere illusions? Morlock's insight said they weren't. He gazed at them, with his inner and outer vision, as they pulsed flaccidly on a surface that looked like the bare rock of the tower. He felt he was missing something.

He lifted his sword to strike. Like Lathmar, he felt that he would not have been allowed to come here if there was any chance of his breaking through the vat. But unlike Lathmar, he was armed with Tyrfing: it was worth attempting. The accursed blade, blazing with the black-and-white pattern of his tal, fell upon the unreflective transparent surface covering the vat …and bounced. He struck another time, and a third, with even greater force and less hope. The effect was the same.

Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders. No tree falls at the first chop. Perhaps, he thought, the inner surface of the vat was what it appeared to bethe bare rock of the tower. He decided he would try to turn the thing over when he heard a soft, shuffling footstep behind him.

He turned to find Steng stabbing at him with a dagger in his long, ropy fingers. No-not Steng: the adept. He avoided the dagger and punched the other in the face with his hand that held Tyrfing; the quarters were too close to use the blade itself. The adept's rotten nose squelched and tore under the impact of his fist.

Morlock contained his reflexive utterance of disgust, but when he saw the other stagger back to the stairway and stand there, he switched the sword to his left hand and wiped the fluid and fragments from his right hand onto his cloak.

"Well, I thought I'd try," the adept said apologetically, what was left of his nose dangling from his gray face. "Your vital organs are still conveniently located in your body, you know."

Morlock didn't answer this, but focused his inner and his outer vision on the adept. A dense cloud of spider-thin talic strands extended from the adept's body up the stairwell, as if the body were a marionette controlled by thousands of invisible strings. But the strings were woven into the talic imprint that rested on the body, and every time the adept spoke they sang in dissonant harmony, a soft cacophony of other voices calling out in pain. These were the strings controlling puppets, perhaps, but here was the puppeteer.

Why did the talic emanations of control go up the stairwell? The stones of the tower, as mere matter, should have been transparent to them.

"You're very rude," the adept said coldly. "Speak when you're spoken to-that's what my dear damned mother always used to say."

Morlock shrugged. He had come here with a single purpose, to commit the ultimate incivility. Besides, he didn't believe the adept was making civil conversation.

One of the talic emanations of control did not go up the stairwell, but toward the far vat.

The adept, who must have been in something like the visionary state continuously, noticed that Morlock noticed it. His gray mouth smiled, and the talic thread twitched, whispering in Urdhven's voice.

"Yes, you must have guessed-those are the living remains of the late Protector, the fellow whose shadow you so unflatteringly called me. He was so grateful to me when I cored him! It burned bright within him. He never understood, even at the end as I consumed him, that that was when I first began to devour his soul. Now he knows, of course. I keep that shred of him nearby as a sort of pet: I look at it sometimes, and think of what I did to him, and he reacts, and it's terribly amusing. Terrible for him, amusing for me. And that thing, the shred of him, it wants nothing but to be reunited with its innards, and of course it can't be-they're forever inaccessible. But it would take others, if it could get them. If there were other, unprotected organs in the room ..

Morlock turned and spitted at the headless, boneless shape as it leapt upon him. The adept laughed, and the laugh sounded closer, as if he might be approaching with the dagger while Morlock was occupied.

Morlock reached out with his talic awareness and snapped the talic threads emanating toward the blanket of muscle and nerve, the shreds of the soul-dead Protector. They quivered and went limp. Morlock shook them off and spun around, his sword at the guard.

The adept shuffled backward to the stone stairs. "Damn it, you sicken me," he hissed.

"I frighten you, evidently," the Crooked Man replied.

"It would take more than you to frighten me," the adept sneered, his gray lips twisting behind his dangling nose. "Your sister is more formidable than you are, and I'm eating her even as we speak."

"Then she frightens you."

"Nothing frightens me."

"You should look up `formidable' in a lexicon some time."

"I-" The adept paused. "You're trying to get at me!"

Morlock was buying time, in fact. There was something here that didn't make sense, something he might be able to sort out if he could think about it for a moment or two. He shrugged.